APR Performance ECU Programming

I was hesitant about doing performance upgrades on the car for a couple of reasons; first, the car is rather quick in stock form. Sufficiently quick, that is. Second, the possibility of mechanical malfunction or accelerated wear and tear on the power train could cause premature failure perfectly deniable under warranty due to the modification itself. However, I feel that modest performance upgrades are rather unintrusive for stock component operation, not to mention driver common sense still plays a major role in how well the car takes to a performance upgrade. In other words, driving the car like a moron would always result in accelerated wear, regardless of performance upgrades or not.

As far as I’m concerned, the choice was clear for APR. The ECU was loaded with all available programs, including 91, 93 and 100 octane, throttle body alignment and stock mode settings.

Achtun!ng in Redmond was the chosen location to perform the upgrade. Thanks to Dion and Skyler, the upgrade was done very quickly and thankfully all done without having to disassemble or solder anything to the car, unlike older generation VW/Audi models. After about 45 minutes, I was on my way.

The grin on my face was automatic. It’s difficult to explain how responsive, crisp and basically fast, the car feels compared to stock form. And this is only in 91 octane mode, since all we have available in this region is 92 octane fuel. Yet, power is available extremely early in the RPM range which results in rather ridiculous wheel spin if you don’t know how to modulate the throttle properly. For me, the learning curve was a couple of fun minutes long. Tire chirp when shifting into second gear is also rather pleasing.

Thanks go out to the folks at APR (Keith and AJ, thanks again guys) and the folks at Achtun!ng (Dion and Skyler) for getting this set up.